AUBURN — It didn’t hit Deshaun Davis until Dec. 9. He was at the team’s end-of-season banquet, an MVP award in hand, posing for pictures with teammates and coaches.

Then his phone buzzed.

“They texted me and told me I had to move out after the last day of practice,” the senior linebacker said. “Life comes at you fast, I can tell you that.”

Davis’ career at Auburn will come to an end Friday against Purdue in the Music City Bowl, which kicks off at 12:30 p.m. CT at Nissan Stadium in Nashville, Tennessee. It was quite the career.

It started in 2014, as a three-star linebacker who missed his senior season at Prichard’s Vigor High and freshman season on the Plains with a torn ACL. When Davis was healthy to play for the first time in 2015, he didn’t play much — he appeared in 12 games, mostly on special teams, and recorded only five tackles.

Then defensive coordinator Will Muschamp and linebackers coach Lance Thompson left for South Carolina before the start of the 2016 season. Starting backers Kris Frost and Cassanova McKinzy had already graduated. New defensive coordinator Kevin Steele and linebackers coach Travis Williams inherited a position devoid of starters and leaders.

So Davis became both. He burst onto the scene in the 2016 opener against Clemson at Jordan-Hare Stadium, and three years later, he’s become such an integral part of the defense that the running joke is that he’s the coordinator and Steele just gets paid for it.

“He’s actually called plays before,” senior defensive lineman Dontavius Russell said at SEC Media Days over the summer. "It’s not a joke.”

Davis enters the Music City Bowl as Auburn’s active career leader in tackles with 257 to go along with 28 tackles for loss and six sacks. He recorded a team-high 107 tackles as a senior on his way to earning All-SEC honors.

“I always told Deshaun, even when he wasn’t playing, just be patient. Your time is coming. When he got that opportunity, I already knew what he was going to do with it,” his mother, Constance Davis Jefferson, told the Montgomery Advertiser last week. “Him going from not playing that much to being a leader this year and being, you know, the leader on defense as well; it’s great. It’s awesome to see how everybody responds to him and the excitement that he has.”

But the play on the field is only a small part of what defines Davis’ time at Auburn:

Davis describes himself as an “active” child, which you might reasonably expect if you have seen him play for Auburn over the last three seasons. He wasn’t a bad kid — he didn’t get his first “B” in a class until his sophomore year of high school — but he “loved to have fun.”

“I didn’t know the difference between recess and class time,” Davis said before the Peach Bowl last year. “I ended up getting into a couple altercations.”

That led Davis to getting kicked out of his magnet school program when he was 12 years old. When his mother came to the school to complete the paperwork and begin the process of transferring him elsewhere, she asked to speak to the teacher who made the decision in order to get some clarity.

What Davis heard next sticks with him to this day.

"He basically told her I was a bad kid and told her she did a terrible job raising me and that I … wouldn’t make it out of high school if I didn’t end up in jail,” Davis said. “That kind of hurt me as a son, because at the time, my father wasn’t in the house for me, and I knew how my mom struggled to provide for me and my older brother at the time.

“It was kind of heartbreaking for someone to even have the confidence to look at my mom and say she did a terrible job raising me, because I know the things she did for us at home, and how I was acting at school wasn’t how I was raised or how she was raising me. So that was like a turning point in my life, because I feel like that was really the first time someone looked at me a doubted me and told me that I basically wasn’t going to be anything, and I kind of took that and used it for motivation.”

Davis became the third person in his family to graduate college on Dec. 16, 2017, earning a degree in media studies from Auburn. A few months earlier when he was back home, Davis said he and his mother were at Walmart and they saw the teacher who once kicked him out of school.

One of the more noticeable moments of Davis’ pregame routine at Jordan-Hare Stadium involves 6-year-old Thomas Phillips.

After Auburn players go through Tiger Walk and gather on the field as a team, Davis seeks out Phillips and his family, who are usually stationed in the first row of the bleachers behind the end zone. After an embrace, the linebacker picks the young fan up and brings him to the goalpost so the two can pray.

"I went over there, and he was wanting to hug me," Davis told AuburnTigers.com. "So I gave him a hug. I tried to put him down, and he wouldn't let me go. He just had a tight grip on my neck."

The friendship only grew from there. The linebacker and his young fan talk on the phone and FaceTime outside of football. They play video games with each other. They have met on the field before a few road games. The Davises and Phillipses consider each other to be family, even if they’re not blood.

“Deshaun has always been the type of person that shows love no matter what,” Jefferson said. “To see him and Thomas’ relationship and how it’s blossoming, it’s kind of mind-blowing, because for a young kid to grab hold of him like that and just love him the way he do, it’s great.”

I don’t normally do this and never met her a day in my life but honestly SHE had our back when no one else did! R.I.P. Mrs.Tammy Bullard 💔 #WDEpic.twitter.com/n1smPAg0Og

Davis never met Tammy Renae Bullard, the Paul Finebaum Show regular known as “Tammy from Clanton” who died along with her 3-year-old granddaughter in a car accident on Nov. 16. But he knew of her.

When Auburn boarded the buses for its trip to the team hotel on Fridays during the season, SEC Network was usually playing on the TVs. Bullard was a diehard Tigers fan and one of the show’s most ardent defenders of the program, and every so often Davis would hear one of her impassioned calls.

“She really loved Auburn,” Davis said. “Even in some years when we weren't good or when we came off a bad loss, she'd call in, and if nobody had Auburn's back, she had Auburn's back."

So before Auburn’s senior day game against Liberty the next day, Davis did something that he had never done before during his college career — he scrawled “Tammy” on the tape covering his right wrist and “Ballard” on the tape covering his right.

“I just wanted to pay my respects, man,” Davis said. “If you love Auburn, you're family to me. I know what this program means to me, and everyone else knows what it meant to her. A lot of people were struck by her death. … I had to pay my homage to her.”

Davis said he wanted to do “something special and different" for Christmas this year. He started a small 501(c)(3), the Won’t Be Denied Foundation, early on during his Auburn career, which he has used to give out scholarships to deserving seniors coming out of Vigor High School.

But he had an idea to do something even bigger this year.

“I want to create Christmas for a family & spread the true meaning of Christmas!” he tweeted on Nov. 16. If you know of anyone IN ALABAMA that is not going to have a Christmas this year for whatever reason, shoot me a DM.”

Davis asked his more than 15,000 followers on Twitter to write in and give reasons why they felt like this person they were recommending “really needs to be blessed,” Jefferson said. The linebacker had close to 65 people reach out to him, and while he wanted to pick each and every one of them, eventually settled on a family from Ashford, Alabama, with a single mother and four children based on the recommendation from a teacher at the children’s school.

After Davis finished moving out of his dorm last week, he and his mother drove two hours south to Ashford to surprise the family and deliver the gifts the children’s mother had suggested — a Hot Wheels set, clothes, etc. They thought the family might wait to open them on Christmas, but instead, they started ripping off wrapping paper that night.

Jefferson said the smiles never left the kids’faces, and the mother thanked her and Davis for making their holiday special.

“When we got back to Mobile from doing that, I was just telling him how proud I am of him, because everybody doesn’t think about blessing someone else, even though it is Christmas,” Jefferson said. “To go outside of family and want to bless another family that is not as fortunate to be able to bless their kids and get their kids what they want for Christmas and everything, he was able to help the mom do that, it’s great.

“I can’t put it into words. It’s just so exciting to see him do the things that he do and have the heard that he has for people.”